Health care error, fraud, and abuse affect everyone. They contribute to the rising costs of health care and, in some instances, diminish the quality of care that is provided.Most health care providers are honest and are providing the best care that they can, but the small number who aren’t find ways to steal billions of money from the health care system each year. Even more is lost to errors in billing that are never found.Strategic efforts are needed to inform the patients about the right use of the medicines. It is in the best interest of all citizens, to be informed, aware, and involved in stopping and preventing error or fraud. There is an increasing awareness and concern over medication errors. Patient safety and medication errors have become prominent issues on the national health care agenda.Beyond the financial costs associated with medication errors are the consequences often endured by the patient. Medication errors represent real losses to employers and employees - in time, money and quality of life. Medication errors can occur in the process of naming, prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, and administering of medications. Patients themselves can also cause errors by failing to comply with instructions.Design/methodology/approach: A total of: a) 300 questionnaires of patients insured at greek social health insurance organization were examined in relation to written and oral doctor obligations, drug side-effects, chronic health problems of the patients, smoking and alcohol consumption and doctor’s driving counseling (year of study: 2003) b) 1,000 prescriptions were taken as a sampling from a total of 10,000 prescriptions issued in two years (2001 - 2002) by doctors of big social health insurance organization in Athens. The doctors were belonged to many specialties and the quality of doctors prescribing (dosology, obligations, prescription completion, drug interactions) was examined c) about 5,500 prescriptions of social health insurance organization were examined for drugs that were not contained in the drug prescription list and could be written on a prescription only as unique and indispensable drug for the certain disease (characterized by the doctor) (year of study: 2002) d) specialized drugs that imported from abroad for certain patients belonged to big social health insurance organization between 2003 – 2004 and had no other therapeutic choice. e) also, characteristical examples of prescriptions contained very serious mistakes that were found during this study, are presented.Originality/value – The results of this study showed inappropriate prescription of many drugs. Unfortunately, the use of medicines without indication, over appropriate dosology or without the right obligations, is not a rare phenomenon in our days. Physicians are often not able to satisfy the demand of the appropriate prescribing of drugs, because of limited time, lack, or wrong information source, or trying to earn more money from the big pharmaceutical companies.So, intervention methods should be chosen to change physicians prescribing behavior, and to improve the quality of their prescriptions.
